Ken Wheatley wrote on 02 June 2010 08:30:44 ...
On 2010-06-01 11:31:46 +0100, Peter Campbell Smith said:

Mizter wrote in
:

I don't think there's any big deal or problem here at all,
was just interesting to note. As the story makes clear, the unused
credit doesn't expire and can be reclaimed by surrendering the card.

It may not be a problem, but accountants (and accounting standards)
nowadays require such things to be recorded as liabilities on corporate
accounts, which is (one reason) why most commercial vouchers and 'points'
have an expiry date.

Indeed, which is why prepaid phone credits always had tight expiry
dates, although commercial considerations have caused relaxation more
recently. The question about the accounting of Oystercard balances had
occurred to me, sitting on several cards with some fairly stale
balances on. I know that accounting rules can be very inflexible but
you would have thought that a statistical approach would be a sensible
way to account for any outstanding balance.

I'm sure you're right about that. You get a similar accounting issue
with outstanding product warranties, where the future cost to be
provisioned can only be estimated statistically, based on the predicted
reliability of the products.

About 15 years ago, I was responsible for calculating worldwide warranty
costs on a range of PCs and servers, and I remember when the auditors
came round to ask how the total figure was arrived at, expecting to be
shown reams of paper. They were a bit bewildered at first to be
confronted with my rather complex Excel file, but they had fun tweaking
the parameters to see how sensitive the end result was to different
assumptions. I guess something similar will be happening with regard to
unsued Oyster cards.
--
Richard J.
(to email me, swap 'uk' and 'yon' in address)